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4 CONTESTED TERRAIN: VISIONS OF MULTICULTURALISM IN AN AMERICAN TOWN Austin Sarat The level of diversity that adults are asked to deal with in this building on a day to day basis, if I had to deal with twenty-five years ago as a beginning teacher, I never would have figured it out. Kids with IEPs, kids with ADD, kids with borderline Autism, kids with Asperger’s, black kids, poor kids, Cambodian kids, and all the kids who don’t fall into those categories, who may have their own distinctive version of struggle, they all show up on the same day within the same classroom space . . . The level of diversity routinely presented to teachers today, in this place, you need a cape and an “S” on your chest in order to be able to figure it out. —Administrator in the Amherst schools, Fall, 2005 If we are ever going to really be a multicultural school system, and we want to be, we are going to have to reinvent public schooling from the bottom-up. That’s our job. —Member of the Amherst-Pelham School Committee, Spring, 2006 I think that the thing that we miss when we have these conversations is what does multiculturalism really mean, and does multiculturalism really mean that it’s okay to dress like a gangster and talk like a gangster and get Cs like the rednecks or Bs like the brainiacs? . . . To me it’s more broadening the curriculum to make sure its not just white guys, that its not just taking you know any old person who wrote something, just say, “Well we got to find some black poet,” but showing that there is a whole world out there of literature and making sure that when you are talking about inventions it’s not just George Washington Carver and then all white guys and you know looking, rebalancing all of that stuff and different things that different cultures have brought to the world that we are all experiencing and that we all appreciate, just not realizing where it came from. And so that to me it is more of the core to multiculturalism that if people can then see themselves more in what they are being taught then they can engage more in the curriculum and are more likely to succeed. —Member of the Amherst-Pelham School Committee, Winter, 2005 101 I live in a place whose liberal tendencies have earned it various nicknames. For example, it has been called “The People’s Republic of Amherst” and “Amherst,An Island Off the Coast ofAmerica.”Amherst, Massachusetts, is a classic college town of about thirty-five thousand residents situated at the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains about one hundred miles west of Boston. It is home to two colleges and the University of Massachusetts, as well as a substantial population of well-educated professionals. On the town common, directly in front of the town hall, fly both the American flag and the flag of the United Nations. And, as some of its residents proudly note, our town has its own foreign policy as well as its own view of what the federal government should be doing on a range of domestic issues (Amherst Town Meeting 2004).1 That the Amherst-Pelham Regional School District has made an explicit, district-wide commitment to multicultural education is thus quite consonant with the character and temperament of the community (Amherst Regional Public Schools 2006a). Indeed, several years ago an article in The Boston Globe observed that “on the multiculturalism meter [Amherst] is close to overheating” (Daley 1999, 32). The district serves more than four thousand students in five elementary schools, a middle school, and a high school (Amherst Regional Public Schools 2006a). The diversity of its student population is reflected in the high school, where 73 percent of the students are Caucasian , 10 percent are African American, 9 percent are Asian, 7 percent are Hispanic, and 1 percent are Native American (Amherst Regional Public Schools 2006b). While other communities argue about the necessity or virtue of multiculturalism in education (Sowell 2004; Feinberg 1996),Amherst is officially committed to it. While other communities do no more than make ad hoc accommodations to newly arrived cultural groups against a background of resentment directed toward them (Lindkvist, chapter 6, this volume), Amherst developed a comprehensive policy of accommodation designed to transform the way its schools operate. While other communities believe there is a tradeoff between multiculturalism and educational excellence (Webster 1997...

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